Even though today’s hearing of the January 6 House Select Committee wasn’t held in primetime, it still yielded some very big headlines, including a former White House aide confirming that Rudy Giuliani is a bit too fond of booze.
Here are some of the other highlights, courtesy of CNN:
- During Monday’s hearing, (former Attorney General William) Barr dismantled specific Trump-backed claims about illegal “vote dumps” in Detroit, nationwide vote-rigging by Dominion with its election machines, and other conspiracy theories.
- The committee made the argument that Trump was repeatedly told by his own top officials, including Barr and Stepien, that the myriad of fraud claims he was pushing were groundless and were certainly not evidence that the election was stolen.
Many have been wondering, however, if the hearings will prompt criminal prosecutions of Trump and others connected to him by the U.S. Department of Justice, and Attorney General Merrick Garland made it clear Monday that the committee does indeed have his attention as well as that of prosecutors at the Justice Department.
What Garland had to say was far from your typical boilerplate response, NPR reports:
“I’m watching and I will be watching all the hearings, although I may not be able to watch all of it live. But I’ll be sure that I’ll be watching all that. And I can assure you that the January 6 prosecutors are watching all the hearings as well,” Garland said at a press conference about a separate enforcement action.
Garland said he was not going to be able to give “my own personal responses to this kind of evidence that is coming out” of this month’s committee hearings, as he does not comment on pending investigations.
Read into that whatever you will, but it’s certainly not what most AGs say when asked such a direct question about congressional hearings.
There have been plenty of questions about whether or not Garland will take a stand and let the DOJ go after Trump and his cronies. Though he has yet to tip his hand, what the attorney general said today offered a bit of insight into a man we rarely hear from and should at least reassure us that he is indeed paying close attention. And that’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
